Pre-Season Learning

Reif

Hi everyone! I'm a Serpent, and I've been trying to learn combat. Problem is, there's so much to take in. Things to look out for, things to make sure I'm doing right, hindering, highlighting, aliases, and all that. I also understand that practice and lots of dying is really what is going to get me to where I want to be. And I'm not against that and learning on the fly. My only problem is that I'm not really learning that much, I feel like. I die to one person, then I look back at it, don't really understand what I need to do, then fight someone else and die again. I've asked several different people how I need to be doing things, and gotten as many different answers. So I guess my question(s) is/are:

What are my main kill methods?
What steps do I need to take to pull those off?
How do I survive long enough to do this?
What's the best way to actually learn and understand all this?

I'm really just looking to see if there's someone out there that can explain it in a way I understand better. Also, apologies to people that I've asked and not understood. Not your fault.
Further information about me:

15 dex
Trans Subterfuge, Oleander in Venom, Impatience in Hypnosis
No artefacts
Level 81, 3297 health
Willing to supply anything else that is relevant.

Thanks in advance, guys. Sorry for the long post.

Borran

Disclaimer: I was a horrible serpent, relying almost wholely on sniping and camus relapsing. 

Kill methods: 
Study your affliction locks. 
Venom lock, soft lock, focus lock, rift lock, disrupt lock, sleep lock, true lock. (I may be forgetting some- it's been a while)

What steps to pull them off: 
I think the main thing is you need to study curing procedures. When you dstabbed with x and y, which one did they cure? From there, you know you stuck them with the other one, and you add another 2 afflictions on top of that, which one do they cure? Now you know they have both of the other 2. Do this until you obtain a lock. 

Survival: 
This is actually a Serpent's forte. Use afflictions that hinder their attacks, increase missing, or reduce the damage you take. You can also put up icewalls in a direction and evade past them to gain small boosts in healing and remove their aggression from you for a moment. The problem with this is keeping up your aggression while doing this- I think hypnosis and relapsing help with this.

Study methods: 
Seriously, study the curing procedures and have someone stand there and take your attacks without fighting back. Watch how they cure. Try to lock them. If you can do it against a dummy, pick up the pace a bit and play it against an enemy that's fighting back- did it work? No? What hindered your lock? How do you fix it? Troubleshoot your tactics. 

Jinsun

My only addition to what Borran said is:

Darkshade stack with a lightwall. It's a super easy starter combo for newer serps, and you'll kill more people than you realize.

Also, Snipe kills in group stuff. You can level up really fast with no real talent needed.

Lastly, the best way is to practice, practice, practice, steal someone else's script, look at it, learn it, rebuild it, practice, repeat. That is really the only way to learn here.

Tael

I am not a great combatant by any stretch of the imagination, but the way to learn the basics is pretty clear:

The best way to learn elementary serpent combat is not to go try to fight people and die to them over and over. That's a good way to practice things once you know what to do, but you're not going to figure out what to do in the first place in the heat of combat. You also don't want to worry about hindering and survival techniques and all that before you can actually do anything with that survival - you don't get much out of knowing how to hinder someone and survive long enough to lock/kill them if you don't know how to lock/kill them.

Also, as a disclaimer, do not expect this to be quick or easy. Serpent is a very demanding class. Other classes can learn basic offensive strategies much more easily. The benefit of this is that, once you know how to do basic locks, you're actually much more effective in many cases and much closer to understanding more advanced strategies than most classes (compare, say, blademaster, with which you can learn to kill lowbies very easily with straight-up damage, but where learning to do that doesn't really help you at all when you go to learn more advanced strategies).

First, find someone with default serverside curing priorities. Have them turn off curing with tree and just stand still while you lock them. You may need to find a serpent to explain to you how to do a basic lock if you aren't familiar with the procedure since, while the dstabbing part is almost entirely straightforward as soon as you grasp the concept of stacking, the hypnosis part is a little more complex (I'm also not entirely sure how it works now since I think a lot of people use hypochondria for the impatience, and that wasn't a thing when I was trying to learn serpent). Then have them turn on tree and figure out how to lock them. Then have them turn on passive curing abilities if they have them and lock them. Then have them try to use active curing abilities and lock them. Finally, start actually fighting them (don't bother trying to learn to lock them while they try to hinder you without trying to kill you - that's actually harder since normally their potential for hindering is limited by the fact that it requires them to pause their own offence).

Next, practice some of the common variations on serverside curing - figure out how to lock someone who has swapped paralysis and asthma priorities for instance. Follow the same steps as above.

Next, find someone with default SVO (and other popular systems) and learn to lock them - this will be harder because they don't use static priorities, but actually have conditional priorities (so they'll cure X before Y if you don't have Z, but will cure Y before X if you have Z). Follow the same steps here.

Once you can do all of those things, you should have a strong handle on how to figure out and deal with any more-complex curing strategies you see, and it'll just come down to practice and managing your own defence against all of the various strategies people use to buy you windows of opportunity to execute your strategy.

Tael

"almost entirely straightforward as soon as you grasp the concept of stacking" shouldn't really say stacking - it should say priorities. I'm not totally sure what 15 dex dstab is like, but I don't think you should need to stack anything to achieve a lock against someone with static priorities and no active or passive curing.

Reif

Hey, thanks for the responses guys. I appreciate them. Is there a certain way you recommend learning the procedure for locking people in various ways? As of now, I sort of did what @Tael was saying, where I just wrote up a scenario where there was no tree tattoos, class curing, no latency, default curing, and them having the worst possible luck with which herbs they ate. Then I wrote everything out in a sort of time-sequence graph thing, showing where I  would dstab with what, and what they would be curing when. Do you think something like this is effective for beginning to visualize it? Or should I go out and watch how someone cures things first and keep trying to lock them?

Tael

I think that can help a lot, though I'm not sure what you mean by "worst possible luck with which herbs the ate" unless you're stacking things (which you don't need to be against default priorities).

For a basic lock against default priorities, which have paralysis above asthma, you just need to use hypnosis to stick impatience at the right time while burying the other afflictions under paralysis (just about every stab will be curare plus another locking affliction - your last stab to seal the deal might not have curare in it, though if they're smart they'll touch tree then, which means you just have to repeat the same strategy before their tree balance comes back).

For asthma > curare, you bury your afflictions behind asthma instead of paralysis. The trick here is that you need to get at least one more affliction with the same cure as asthma in, and then hope they cure it instead of asthma when you actually go to finish the lock. This means your strategy only has a 50% chance of success (if you add more afflictions with the same cure, the chance goes up), but on the other hand, it also means that you can keep them paralysed pretty much the entire time, so many classes won't be able to fight back very effectively. (Note that situations like this are when you might use the EXPERT DIAGNOSER trait - if you want to see whether they cured the thing you're trying to stack against curing. Though for asthma, you don't really need to use it since you can just tell whether it worked by whether they smoke to cure slickness.)

After that, things start getting more complex, but you can usually work it out. Working on paper is useful, but it's usually easier to just grab someone and figure out the sequence by trial and error - stab curare/kalmia, see how they cure, stab curare/kalmia twice in a row, see how they cure, do it again and add a third stab and see how they cure. Build your routine, adding one stab to it at a time until it does what you need it to do. Absolutely use serverside queueing to make sure you're attacking as fast as possible and to keep results consistent. Do that against default priorities, against common priorities, against default svo, and against maybe omni or anything else you can think of that you're likely to run into.

Then, once you're actually in combat, do a few test stabs to try to feel out their priorities. One stab can tell you whether they prioritise asthma or paralysis, though it'll take a few (and maybe impatience) to tell if they have conditional priorities. Serpent locking routines are so fast though that it isn't really a problem for you to go through one attempt, discover they have conditional priorities, and then just adapt and try again.

Aerek

Reif said:

Then I wrote everything out in a sort of time-sequence graph thing, showing where I  would dstab with what, and what they would be curing when. Do you think something like this is effective for beginning to visualize it? Or should I go out and watch how someone cures things first and keep trying to lock them?

Both, really, but being able to plan your tactics, test them, and then adjust is what's most important, and charting them out like this is a great way to get a feel for how combat works. When you can chart out a tactic on paper, it's very easy to see why a given tactic is effective, or why/how/when it can fail. As a Serpent, you can't *rely* on cookie-cutter, pre-charted setups, but in the beginning, they're invaluable to help wrap your head around all the details.

Example: the Darkshade loop Jinsun mentioned will kill someone if you can "stick" them with Darkshade for 16 seconds with a lightwall present. Assuming paralysis>asthma>darkshade affliction priorities, and Server-Side Curing Tree use, we can plot out a likely scenario to make that happen. With 15 DEX and Nimble, I'm going to assume you're at about a 2.2 Dstab, and using that, we can chart out how a fight will go against an opponent if they don't hinder you, use active cures, or run:

You                              Opponent
----                             ---------
0.0 Dstab curare/xentio          0.0 eat bloodroot  [clum]
                                 0.1 touch tree     []
                                 1.5 herb balance   []
2.2 Dstab curare/xentio          2.2 eat bloodroot  [clum]
                                 3.7 eat kelp       []
4.4 Dstab curare/darkshade                          [par, dark]
                                 5.2 eat bloodroot  [dark]
6.6 Dstab curare/kalmia                             [par, ast, dark]
                                 6.7 eat bloodroot  [ast, dark]
                                 8.2 eat kelp       [dark]
8.8 Dstab curare/kalmia                             [par, ast, dark]
                                 9.7 eat bloodroot  [ast, dark]
11.0 Dstab curare/xentio                            [par, ast, clum, dark]
                                 11.2 eat bloodroot [ast, clum, dark]
                                 12.7 eat kelp      [ast?, clum?, dark]
13.2 Dstab curare/kalmia                            [par, ast, clum?, dark]
                                 14.1 tree balance  [par, ast, clum?, dark]  
                                 14.2 eat bloodroot [ast, clum?, dark]
                                 14.3 touch tree    [ast?, clum?, dark?]
15.4 Dstab curare/kalmia                            [par, ast, clum?, dark?]
                                 15.7 eat bloodroot [ast, clum?, dark?]
                                 17.2 eat kelp      [ast?, clum?, dark?]
17.6 Dstab curare/kalmia                            [par, ast, clum?, dark?]
                                 18.7 eat bloodroot [ast, clum?, dark?]
19.8 Dstab curare/xentio                            [par, ast, clum, dark?]
                                 20.2 eat bloodroot [ast, clum, dark?]
                                 20.4 Death

In this basic example, you can see how your attacks fall against their curing. Note the following key moments:

• In trying to "stick" darkshade, using it at 2.2 would be futile, because they get to eat twice before the 4.4 stab, (because of the Tree touch at 0.0) so you need to use curare/kalmia again as a dummy combo to waste herb balance before you slip darkshade in.
• The stab at 6.6, comes just before they eat an herb at 6.7. This means that if you hesitated or lagged at all at 6.6 and didn't give them curare/kalmia in time, they'd eat ginseng at 6.7 and cure your darkshade, which is what you don't want. Charting makes it easy to spot these critical moments.
• Tree balance comes back at 14.1 in this example. If they have asthma, clumsiness, and darkshade at that point, they have a 33% chance of Tree curing Darkshade. If they have only asthma and darkshade, it's a 50% chance. You'll know pretty quickly, since Darkshade gives 3rd-person messages when it "ticks", so you'll see if those messages stop or continue, but it is just a dice-roll that you don't have a lot of control over. If it does get darkshade, you'll just have to recompose yourself and start over.
• Darkshade does a little bit of damage every 3 seconds or so for the first half of its arc, and gives paralysis on the balk half. Technically, that means that starting around 12.0, Darkshade will be giving them paralysis as well, but I omitted this for simplicity.
• I used xentio here because clumsiness can help you survive against the physical classes that do damage. An equally valid approach would be to replace xentio with vardrax or euphorbia, stacking more ginseng afflictions on the opponent to make curing darkshade harder. (If you don't understand why "stacking" works, I'll touch on it in a second)
  

Once you have a plan that you've charted out to see if it's mechanically viable, then you should test it against a friend or opponent. This is where you should watch how they cure to see if their priorities are what you expected them to be. Highlighting what your target eats can really help with this. I highlight bloodroot/magnesium a dark red, kelp/aurum a dark yellow, and ginseng/ferrum a dark green. These are muted colors that don't distract me while I'm paying attention to other things, but they make it easy to notice patterns. In the chart there, I'd expect the color-coded pattern of their eating to go "red, red, yellow, red, red, yellow" because of the way the way your stabs interact with their priorities. If for some reason I saw "yellow, yellow, red" I'd know they prioritize asthma>paralysis, or if I see green at any point, I know they've cured darkshade, since darkshade is the only ginseng affliction I'm using in this case.

Other random trivia that you'll want to know:

• Herb balance and pipe balance is 1.5 seconds. Salve balance is 1.0 except Restoration which is 4.0.Tree balance is 13 or 14 seconds, unless they have one of the traits that makes it longer.
  
• Rebounding comes up every 8.5 seconds if they're using it, so learn to deal with that via Flay.
• Voyria will always be cured first by passive curing like Dagaz runes, rites of Healing, or Hallelujah harmonics. If you do seal a lock, you can buy yourself time by giving voyria before the passive healing ticks.
• "Stacking": If they have 2 afflictions cured by the same cure, when they eat that cure it's completely random which affliction it actually cures. Thus you can "stack" similarly-cured afflictions to "stick" a particular affliction that is usually high-priority, if the opponent just gets unlucky with their eating. (I.E. eating kelp with asthma/clumsiness/sensitivity would have only a 33% chance of curing asthma. Eating ginseng with darkshade/addiction/nausea would have only a 33% chance of curing darkshade. Eating goldenseal with impatience/stupidity/dizziness would have only a 33% chance of curing impatience. Those are all used commonly by Serpents.)

That's all I have off the top of my head. It seems daunting at first, but it's really just critical thinking, like a logic puzzle. The hardest part is learning and remembering things like balance times, mechanic quirks, and common priorities. Once you have the pieces to the puzzle, it's really not too hard to start putting them all together.

Good luck! You can often find me in Cyrene, haunting the arena, if you want to go a round or three.

Reif

@Aerek thanks! I know I don't know a whole lot, but this all sounds like pretty solid advice! That sequence you showed is almost exactly what I did, only I think my dstab is 2.3, but that could just be what I always see in latency. I think I'll probably keep writing certain scenarios down on paper, such as adding tree tattoos or passive curing or something, adjusting for latency and all that, just so I can actually SEE it, and see how it works, but it sounds like now that I can sort of grasp the basics, I really just need to go out and do it.

Borran

@Reif I'm working on learning Sentinel Combat and have a bit of serpent experience. I am typically artied up, but if you want I can remove them for sparring.

Not sure when you play, but hit me up whenever you come around.

Tael

Reif said:

@Aerek thanks! I know I don't know a whole lot, but this all sounds like pretty solid advice! That sequence you showed is almost exactly what I did, only I think my dstab is 2.3, but that could just be what I always see in latency. I think I'll probably keep writing certain scenarios down on paper, such as adding tree tattoos or passive curing or something, adjusting for latency and all that, just so I can actually SEE it, and see how it works, but it sounds like now that I can sort of grasp the basics, I really just need to go out and do it.

If you use serverside queueing, unless you really lag, your latency shouldn't have any real effect on your offense.

Reif

@Borran I'm usually 7-10ish central time. I've seen you around before, I think.

@Tael I do, I was really just going to add like a tenth of a second to my offense and see what that did to when my dstabs fell and when they cured, but I don't think it'll make too much of a difference since the balance time always varies a little bit. I'm pretty sure I've seen sub 2 second dstabs without my adding dexterity or arties or anything, but I've also seen closer to 2.5 second dstabs, so I guess it probably evens out.

Borran

@reif Unfortunately, I'm half-way around the world right now. That'd be the time that I usually play.

Actually, I may be able to alter my sleep cycle enough to play for 1 hour each day during that time... but I probably won't to be honest.

Let me just hope that I catch you Thursday nights.

Tael

Reif said:

@Borran I'm usually 7-10ish central time. I've seen you around before, I think.

@Tael I do, I was really just going to add like a tenth of a second to my offense and see what that did to when my dstabs fell and when they cured, but I don't think it'll make too much of a difference since the balance time always varies a little bit. I'm pretty sure I've seen sub 2 second dstabs without my adding dexterity or arties or anything, but I've also seen closer to 2.5 second dstabs, so I guess it probably evens out.

There shouldn't be anywhere near that amount of variation with serverside queueing.

Note that latency will still affect what it looks like your balance times are. If you see your first stab, queue the next stab, and then your latency spikes before you receive the message from the queue firing, it might look like a 2.5s dstabs even if it's actually 2.3s (because you're seeing the result of your stab ~.2 seconds after it actually happened on the server). And if your latency then goes back down before your next queued stab fires, it would look like it was somehow extra fast. In both cases though, the actual timing of the stabs on the server was unchanged.

Herose

@Reif, I found the easiest way to learn how to lock people was to start learning in small incremental steps.

First, figure out how to lock someone who

• isn't fighting back
• doesn't use rebounding
• doesn't use passive curing
• doesn't use tree
• doesn't use class specific active curing
• doesn't focus

You'll need to figure out how to stick anorexia, slickness, and asthma.

Then you can start adding each of these back in which increases the difficulty and will require a slightly different method.

I would add back in focus next.  Now, you'll need to use impatience in hypnosis.  What you'll need to practice is how to time your snap so that impatience will activate at the right time.  Keep in mind that the first suggestion in hypnosis (the last to be suggested) will always fire exactly at the seal time you set.  Try setting it at 1 second to start (the minimum).  Do the method you discovered in the previous section but right before you do the final doublestab (presumably to deliver anorexia and slickness) you will snap one second before you regain balance.  Then your next doublestab and impatience will hit at the same time.

Next, add back in rebounding and the tree tattoo.  You can use the same finishing method you discovered above but your stack will take longer as you deal with rebounding.  I would suggest you start by simply envenoming your whip with curare when you flay as that is the most common affliction with the highest priority meaning it will be likely cured by the time you flay and you won't be wasting that time.  Keep an eye on the tree tattoo and when they touch it. 

Next, add back in active curing.  There is quite a few variations of this and you'll need to know how to prevent them and watch for them.  Weariness is a big affliction which will stop a few.  Hemophilia, prone, and recklessness will stop most of the remaining ones.

After you figure all that out then get them to fight back.  Once you have all the other building blocks down you'll be able to adjust what you need to do based on their actions and the hindering they afflict on you.

There is a lot you can do and while there are a few similar techniques out there which will help you achieve all of the goals above you should discover them on your own as that will build the understanding you need.

Rip

And no one complains a bit about @tael's long ass posts....must be the rainbow bear. 

Tael

Rip said:

And no one complains a bit about @tael's long ass posts....must be the rainbow bear. 

Joke's on you! People complain about them pretty regularly.

Arditi

On the mobile version, it looks like a little bluebird.

Reif

@Herose that's what I've been working on so far. I figured out how to lock someone without tree, rebounding, or class curing, then I added tree to the mix and got that figured out. The weird thing there was that their curing only touched tree on a hardlock, and so I just had to get used to doing the same sequence correctly twice. It was pretty simple since they cured darkshade over asthma. But I assume it will be easier if someone uses the tree before the hardlock hits because I won't have to rehypnotise in that time. So my question as of now is: when they keep up rebounding does the flaying with curare slow me down much? Does it give their curing a chance to catch up?

Dochitha

@Reif I think you can snap them to touch tree prior to starting your lock loop. I am not so sure about serpent but as a Shaman I will make them touch tree before serious affliction loop. Tree comes back in 13-14 secs, you have about 10s after forcing tree to loop your SOP.

Herose

@Reif your DEX affects your flay speed so you should test it out to get your exact time but you should find it just a tad slower than herb balance.  It will slow you down a bit and will only deliver a venom if the target is also not shielded. 

Unless you are fighting someone who is being defensive they will likely drop their own rebounding shortly after it comes up so it can be beneficial to wait for that rather than flaying.

Typically when I hear "hard lock" I think anorexia, slickness, asthma, paralysis, and impatience.  The "true lock" would be additional afflictions to stop active/passive curing.  Based on what you said are they waiting until they have anorexia, slickness, impatience and asthma to touch their tree tattoo?

What @Dochitha said about including "touch tree" in your hypnosis chain can help.  Unfortunately, you'll need to learn up to "action" in hypnosis to try it out.

Another option would be to include "hypochondria" in your hypnosis chain because that can trigger impatience again if they wait until they have a hard lock to tree tattoo.  But again, that requires a high level of hypnosis.

There are only two options left:

1. ensure they are paralyzed when impatience hits (or tree is burned if they aren't saving it) so they can't touch tree
   
2. add in other afflictions and hope they are cured instead when they touch tree.  If you're trans in Subterfuge your snake can help a lot with this.  You'll need to strike a balance with this.  If you load someone up with afflictions they will become defensive and possibly run which will make it harder to finish.  If you load to few then the tree tattoo can cure something you don't want it to.

As you discovered, you can use darkshade to both kill and stack afflictions.  If you want to ensure they are paralyzed when you start your chain then you can use darkshade.  If they are curing paralysis over darkshade then keep hitting them with curare/darkshade and sneaking in other afflictions when you can (i.e. asthma).  At some point they will have to cure darkshade first before paralysis or else they will die.  If you have a lightwall it will happen within 15s.  Keep an eye out for that ferrum/ginseng eat and then snap (for impatience) and stab anorexia / slickness (hopefully they already have asthma).  Now they have a hard lock.

Tael

Dochitha said:

@Reif I think you can snap them to touch tree prior to starting your lock loop. I am not so sure about serpent but as a Shaman I will make them touch tree before serious affliction loop. Tree comes back in 13-14 secs, you have about 10s after forcing tree to loop your SOP.

You definitely can, but it introduces a little more complexity for serpents than it does for shaman. With vodun, you can just make them touch tree then go - it costs a few fashions and some balance but that's about it. With hypnosis, when you snap the first suggestion goes off exactly when you set the timer for, but subsequent suggestions fire at semi-random intervals. So if you put in an action suggestion to touch tree before impatience, it means you can't predict when impatience will hit them quite as well.

Santar

Most people are in Saoghal Valley within a second or two of me snapping them.

Reif

So I've been practicing a little. I understand the theory behind it (sort of), but I'm still having trouble. In this situation, they get their tree tattoo back too fast for me to re-lock them. Plus he has fitness, so I'm not really sure what I can do about either of those. Any advice?

https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/82707eb9

Borran

@Reif (At work, so can't view log fully) So you baited the tree tattoo out of him, then proceeded with the lock and he got tree back before you finalised the lock? It looks like you spent a little extra time because that hypnosis failed, so maybe try it again and see if you can do it without hypno failing?

Also.. did you build your affliction tracker/echos/highlights or did you get that from somewhere? I'm looking for somewhere to pull my base script for my own aff tracker.

Cynlael

@Borran that's Austere's tracker, it looks like. (whose thread you posted in, heh)
http://forums.achaea.com/discussion/3314/ak-opponent-tracking#latest

Borran

Oh good... that's the one I downloaded, but I haven't actually implemented it yet.

Austere

Add a ,false) onto the end of your pt send, so it looks prettier(echo won't split your dstab then ).  Stop trying to relay afflictions before you actually confirm they didn't hit shield or rebounding.   Add your dirk into the osettings script for odirk. It's not tracking anything but affs with second messages.(paralysis, slickness,  impatience, darkshade).  If you have already done that, update Ak. If you need help with setup, hit me up.  

Reif

@Borran
There were other times that I didn't mess up the hypnosis, and he still got it back before I could finish my sequence, too.

@Austere I'm not sure how to wait and confirm that they didn't hit shield or rebounding before it relays, unfortunately, but I am appreciative of the suggestiong of the ,false)... Anything that I could do to make it less spammy is perfectly okay with me. Thanks for your responses, guys.

Also, I know I downloaded the aff tracker, but I'm not entirely sure how it works yet, to be honest, or how to use it. I'll definitely start with the adding the dirk thing, though.

Xinna

Herose gave some good advice earlier in this thread - several ways to potentially counter a tree on lock. You need to ensure they are paralysed when you complete the lock OR have extra afflictions on them and hope tree cures one of those. Snake can help with the latter. Darkshade can help with the former, OR delivering gecko pre-lock completion. For example, curare/xentio, curare/xentio, curare/darkshade, kalmia/gecko, snap, curare/slike, depending on their curing priority and your dstab speed.

You can also hypnotise impatience and hypochondria and use hypochondria to re-give impatience after they tree out of your first lock, so that you don't have to re-hypnotise and can complete the second lock before tree balance is recovered. This requires some extra ginseng/ferrum affliction stacking to get hypochondria to give impatience asap.

You are not going to beat tree tattoo by locking, rehypnotising, and then locking again. Generally, if you have to re-hypnotise, that's a start over.

You need to be cognizant of your dstab speed and how many herb eats you are allowing your target to get in between dstabs too. A lot of that log is you doing:

curare/xentio - target cures both

curare/xentio - target cures paralysis

curare/kalmia - target eats bloodroot AND kelp, curing either clumsy or asthma

curare/darkshade - target eats bloodroot

snap, gecko/slike

When you're snapping, the target has darkshade and either asthma or clumsy. There's a 50% chance that the target doesn't even have asthma. You can make this a 100% chance if you switch your afflicting around to something like this:

curare/xentio - target cures both

curare/xentio - target cures paralysis

curare/darkshade - target cures paralysis and darkshade, still has clumsy

curare/kalmia - target eats bloodroot (has clumsy and asthma)

snap, gecko/slike

Finally, you're mistiming your snaps! You need to snap earlier, because you are allowing your target to cure in between gecko/slike hitting and impatience hitting. This gives them a chance to focus anorexia before impatience hits, even if you did everything else perfectly and even if they can't tree. You need to snap earlier so impatience hits either exactly when gecko/slike hits, or (more likely) sometime before gecko/slike, but after the target has used up herb balance so the target can't eat goldenseal before the gecko/slike.

Reif

Thank you for your response @Xinna .. I definitely want to give this a shot, as it sounds like solid advice. Is there anything you'd recommend for a way to get past fitness as well?

Also, I only have impatience in hypnosis, so I won't be able to do the hypochondria